Oracle Blog

The Test Drive: Chhandomay on Sun Product Reviews

Friday Aug 14, 2009

Founded in
1861,
the University of Washington
has
one of the leading mathematics research departments in the United
States. Several years ago, William Stein, an associate professor of
mathematics at UW, collaborated with more than 150 mathematicians
around the world to build Sage, an open-source computational software
program. Sage can be used to solve a wide range of mathematical
problems including algebra, calculus, number theory, numerical
computation and more.

Stein recently
looked to
expand the computational capabilities of Sage, but felt limited by
the hardware the department was using to run the software.
Additionally, the department wanted to increase the overall
performance of Sage while also making the automated testing of the
platform faster and easier. Last November, the department began
evaluating new server solutions to support Sage and eventually
selected a new system from Sun.

Since deploying
the Sun
solution in December, the department has gained a huge increase in
computing power that has significantly sped the automated testing of
Sage. Stein reports that with the Sun X4450, it only takes three
minutes to run the standard Sage test suite, a task that previously
took at least an hour. Stein noted that “our previous
infrastructure was fine, but the entire thing was only about
one-third the capacity of a single Sun X4450 server.” He said
Sage runs computations much faster and stated: “The whole way I
do mathematical calculations using Sage is so much different now that
I have this hardware.”